Ten at 10: Mastodon - ‘Crack The Skye’ Ten Years On…

09 September 2019

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Mastodon’s back catalogue is a rich and diverse pool of stoner metal, progressive rock and traditional metal. Slap bang in the middle of their discography sits, in my opinion, their magnum opus. Crack The Skye is fifty minutes of unrivaled beauty, brutality and riffs that became, pretty much, all I listened to when I first discovered them back in 2014.

A concept album representing the element of aether, Crack The Skye tells the story of a paraplegic who astral travels out of his body and loses his way, meeting Rasputin and The Devil along the way. The album is also an homage to drummer Brann Dailor’s sister Skye, who took her own life at the age of fourteen. In an interview discussing the title of the album, Brann Dailor said “My sister passed away when I was a teenager and it was awful [...] Her name was Skye, so Crack the Skye means a lot of different things. For me personally, it means the moment of being told you lost someone dear to you, [that moment] is enough to crack the sky.”

There’s something about Mastodon’s sound that makes me feel sated and whole, like after a big meal or when your team wins the cup. The drums, with their dynamic fills, the guitars with their beautiful tones and riffs, the vocal harmonies and the progressive songwriting all combine perfectly to make me feel emotionally and spiritually satisfied. And for me, that feeling is never more apparent than on Crack The Skye. Despite being ten years old, it still sits in my top five favourite albums of all time and will be remembered as an incredibly important monument in the history of metal.